Aviation, Arms, and Apologies: mapping the Boeing social media response to 2019 Ethiopian Airlines crash

The Department of Politics and Public Administration continues their seminar series with “Aviation, Arms, and Apologies: mapping the Boeing social media response to 2019 Ethiopian Airlines crash” by Natalie Jester (University of Gloucestershire) and Emma Dolan (UL). Boeing is most famous for aviation but also produces arms, making $29.2billion from the latter in 2018. Whilst deaths facilitated by the arms trade are largely unacknowledged, cast into the realm of the “public secret”, Boeing produces itself through “neutral” technological advancement. This paper builds on works on public secrecy, which investigate how (lack of) acknowledgement obscures everyday security arrangements. How can we know the public secret? We argue that public apology and scandal function as boundary-delineating practices, locating certain issues within the public secret and rendering others knowable and sayable. We examine Boeing’s Twitter response to the March 2019 Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 crash. The content: 1) produced the crash as tragedy, positioning Boeing as “sorry” and capable of grief, 2) allowed Boeing to “take responsibility”, positioning safe operation of their products as a moral obligation. Within the wider political context of the arms trade on the one hand and responsibility for safety in commercial aviation on the other, we position Boeing’s Twitter navigation of apology/scandal not as simply corporate face-saving, but as a practice of (re)confirming the public secret, positioning aviation deaths as knowable and grievable, and those lost to the arms industry as neither. This seminar will take place 2pm, Wednesday February 22 in A1054. All welcome!